broadcast media + personal documentary

So this is the idea that I had on the bus way home, with regard to Henry's proposed idea about future consumer electronics: broadcast media + personal documentary. There might be little logically weird assertions because its still a very rough idea, but I think it's an interesting direction.

It's a pretty common idea prevailing in many emerging research areas that computing should be drawn back to the physical world, instead of sticking to the cyberspace, after all we are living in the physical world, interacting with other people, participating discussions, workshops, contests, and other activities, as well as attending concerts, campaigns, parades, and other different events. What's not discussed much about is, however, that it seems similar when it comes to the situation we have about the videos that we collect in order to document our life experiences.

Consider a scenario, where you are navigating in a city, having a "personal memory center" at hand ─ a hand-held device that can record and playback media files that represent your personal memories. The ideal function for this personal memory center to be able to perform is, to document everything that you see, that you hear, and even that you think. What you see and what you hear are not hard to record using today's built-in camcorders in hand-held devices, but what you are thinking relates not only to the person whom you're talking to or the interesting events happening in front of your eyes. Partly, it relates to the bigger world as well. The presidential election, the war, the global warming issue, the oscar academy award, the baseball game last night...all the things that is payed attention to by the public ─ including you as well ─ affect what you think substantially. Today, if you want to collect the media segments about these public issues that is related to what you're thinking, you can certainly go to CNN.com or youtube to download whatever is there. But the troublesome steps of going back to the cyberspace in order to get these media files are analogous to the problem that ubiquitous computing is trying to solve. We want the information ─ including broadcast videos that are involved with our personal experiences ─ to be embedded in the physical world.

By "broadcast videos", I'm more emphasizing on conventional TV broadcast videos in particular, although personal broadcast platforms like youtube or podcast are included in this general term as well. At the digital age where every person can be a reporter or even TV station, the need of conventional TV programs (especially news and live programs) are, nevertheless, not decreased (Certainly you can watch these programs over the web, but they are still generated by the conventional TV channels). That is, we still need reporters or all these TV channels to exist, and they can never be fully replaced, because we always need professionals to find the events, and explain thoroughly what has happened. After all, for each of the live events that are happening in our world, one may have seen it, but is definitely not seeing it for most of the time.

So in order to provide an environment where users can document as much life experience as they want, we wish the environment to have conventional TV programs ubiquitously prevailing in the physical environment, and can be accessed by the "personal memory center" without users' manual request (connecting to the web and looking for it). More specifically, whenever a user walks in an environment where one or more televisions are playing their respective channels, these channels can be automatically downloaded through the direct wireless connection between the TVs and the personal handheld device, or played synchronously in its screen if selected ─ assuming all the privacy issues are taken care of. So after you walk through Time Square in New York City, you can have a montage of all the moving images that you experienced along the way; or, over a chat or dinner with a friend in front of a television, it will be easy to compose the experience that you have containing various different topics because the fast switches between channels. You can collect the TV content even if you were recording your friend talking using the camcorder on the handheld device.

To give a brief summary, video as a representation of personal experience is not equivalent to video as an exclusive thing to watch at one instant moment, because an experience is a collective entity that may require thousands of videos to give a complete illustration. The direct communication between TVs and handheld devices, or any other types of video-related devices, will open users' access to more videos of more categories, which will in turn allow them to collect a more complete corpus for their personal experience, and to compose or re-experience their experience in a more vivid way.

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